I suspect that Tricky Kick wanted to be obscure even by the standards of TurboGrafx-16
games. It presented a deliberately
confusing front back in 1990. The title suggests a soccer game, but it isn’t.
The “family” label suggests a party game, but it allows only one
player. And the box art, with its cave-guy and samurai and schoolgirl standing on an eye puzzle, fits nothing so much as the cover of an unclassifiable
prog-rock album with a title like Precambrian Odditure.

The Escherian topography of the cover hints at the truth: Tricky
Kick is a puzzle game. Its characters advance through stages by
booting an enemy, usually a harmless one, around the screen until it collides
with an identical foe and vanishes. That’s about it. A few creative obstacles
and enemy-launching gadgets pop up, but the game remains too limited, both in
what you see and what you can do. It never gets even half as interesting as The
Adventures of Lolo or Kickle Cubicle, but TurboGrafx-16 owners didn’t have much
in that category. If they wanted to shove things around a screen with little
threat involved, Tricky Kick had them captive.

The best parts of Tricky Kick have nothing to do with the gameplay.
Each character gets a cute, short introduction and a unique setting: elven hero
Oberon takes on an evil sorceress, schoolgirl Mayumi finds her way to her
classmate Biff’s party (yes, Biff), a kid named Taro undergoes some
haunted-house hazing, the feudal Japanese prince Suzuki schemes his way to rule
the nation, and an Ultraman knock-off called Udon punts giant monsters around city
streets. Oh, and a caveman known as Gonzo heads out to slay a big meaty
mammoth.

Gonzo’s intro is my favorite piece of the game by far, due to
its delightful vision of Paleolithic life. The matriarch of the family, in the
absence of modern diapers, has swaddled her youngest child in her mass of untamed cavewoman hair. Gonzo’s eldest son takes after him, one
of his daughters takes after her mom, and the remaining kids look like troglodyte versions of Charlie Brown…or Bonk, the bald cave-boy who became the
TurboGrafx’s only respected mascot. In fact, we might be seeing Bonk’s origin
right here! And maybe the purple-haired girl grew up to become Flare from The
Legendary Axe or the mysterious assassin from The Legendary Axe II! It’s
another point for the Grand Unified Theory of TurboGrafx games!

Most of all, I like Gonzo’s expression. You can see a
determined grimace there in his beard, but a quicker glance makes it look like
he has the smiling, noseless, innocent face of a Lego figure. I like that
duality, even though Gonzo’s obviously not supposed to look upbeat. He knows
that he faces a harsh task and perhaps a harsher return home. Should he survive his
foray, he could come back to find that one of his children was snatched up by a
Haast’s eagle, that his family was devoured by a sabertoothed tiger, or that
his entire tribe was wiped out by an avalanche or some neighboring clan that
just invented spears and genocide. But he can’t let anyone know that.